S|O Gallery is pleased to present the work of sculptor Sydney Vize in COMMUNITY, our inaugural exhibition in Johnson City. Vize's work begins with moments that are at once pleasurable and unsettling, the brief, everyday experiences that resist easy explanation.

Vize takes her cues from situations that carry real pleasure alongside intellectual or emotional distress. Felt together, such responses can seem impossible to articulate, and it is tempting to let them cancel each other out. Vize instead examines them closely, asking how fleeting pangs in ordinary moments can reveal truths about the world and about our reactions to it. Her titles, among them Alone in the elevator, Politely looking away, and Trapped between evil bumper stickers in the drive-through, point to the familiar settings where these tensions arise.

She envisions physical gaps between feelings and ideas that exist simultaneously yet seem fundamentally incompatible, and proposes that those gaps hold the key to how contradictions coexist. Her sculptures fill the shapes of those gaps until they can stand on their own. Presented in outlined and often vulnerable positions, these forms offer ways of understanding contradictory realities.

Vize holds an MFA in sculpture from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and a Bachelor of Arts in studio art and literature from Beloit College in Beloit, Wisconsin. She lives in Austin, Texas, with her husband and daughter.